4 min readNew DelhiJun 8, 2026 05:30 AM IST
The CBSE has received a final security clearance for its examiner-facing re-evaluation portal after an IIT-led cybersecurity review completed its last round of testing Friday night, clearing the way for reassessment of Class 12 answer scripts, The Indian Express has learnt.
The IIT teams will remain on standby in case fresh issues emerge during the re-evaluation exercise, said sources.
The development comes days after The Indian Express reported on June 5 that CBSE was forced to delay the launch of its Post-Result Activities (PRA) portal after expert teams from two IITs uncovered multiple high-severity vulnerabilities in the Board’s digital systems. It has been learnt that CBSE decided not to use the Coempt EduTeck platform, which powered this year’s controversial On-Screen Marking (OSM) system, for the re-evaluation process. Instead, student and examination data were migrated to infrastructure directly controlled by CBSE, with the re-evaluation workflow redesigned to run through the Board’s own systems.
The IIT-led teams are now preparing a set of recommendations for the Education Ministry and the CBSE, which are expected to call for all future examination software to be designed with cybersecurity safeguards.
According to an official in the know of the developments, the recommendations will focus on ensuring that cybersecurity considerations are incorporated from the earliest stages of software development. The report is also expected to recommend that, once developed, the software should undergo a thorough “red-teaming” exercise by a competent independent group before being deployed.
The CBSE did not respond to requests for a comment.
Notably, the audit of the process employed the “red team-blue team” method, in which the “blue” team – comprising the CBSE’s original developers, experts from IIT Madras and the Digital India Corporation (DIC) – was responsible for fixing vulnerabilities, while the “red” team of IIT Kanpur experts tried to break into the system and identify weaknesses.
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According to the official quoted above, the expert teams completed their final round of testing on Friday night and found no significant vulnerabilities remaining in the system. “From our side, we gave a green signal on Friday night. Whatever we found has been fixed and we could not find anything more. There may be some minor vulnerabilities, but nothing that would have any impact,” the official said.
The examiner-facing platform had remained unavailable even after the PRA portal was launched on June 2. While students were able to submit requests for verification and re-evaluation, answer scripts could not be assigned to examiners for want of security clearance.
Sources said the Board is in the process of informing the examiners that they can begin accessing the system and participate in addressing students’ requests for re-evaluation. Rather than reviewing entire answer books, examiners will be shown only the specific questions flagged by students for re-evaluation, they added. The exercise will be conducted digitally; examiners will access scanned answer scripts on tablets and award marks in accordance with CBSE’s original marking scheme. The marks awarded by the original evaluator will not be visible to the re-evaluating examiner, said the sources.
This is intended to allow an independent assessment and reduce the possibility of bias, the official quoted above said.